For Print Only

A Division of UnderConsideration

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2009
–
2017

By now we hope you have heard of our new book, Flaunt: Designing effective, compelling and memorable portfolios of creative work, so this is not a self-serving promotional post and taking advantage that this is our blog. (Okay, maybe a little). Since we have all the insider information about how the book came to be we thought it would be interesting or helpful to share it.

We had originally made up our mind that Flaunt would only be sold as a PDF, making our profit margin much higher since we wouldn’t have to plunk down thousands of dollars to get it printed. Then we thought, well maybe we print a limited edition or something on-demand, but doing either of these options would have made the book very expensive to buy in order for us to make a profit. Then we considered the idea of printing in China thinking that we could spend a couple thousand dollars on, like, 10,000 copies. Not the case, of course. Printing in China works out when you have large print runs and have a lot of time to wait — we had neither, since we only wanted to print 1,000 or 2,000 copies and we wanted the finished product in our hands right away, and going to China would have given us the final product three months after submitting the files.

At this point we were fully committed to printing the damn book. We just couldn’t stay away from print. After working with Capital Printing on a client project here in Austin we pursued the idea with them and worked with their team to come up with an economic way of producing the book. While we originally wanted some lovely brand-name uncoated paper we settled on a coated house stock of matte paper that was, of course, cheaper and easier to work with on press than uncoated. We also decided on a 2-color cover to save a little on CMYK printing. After some careful negotiations we settled on a price of $12,000 for 2,000 copies at $6 per unit. While we originally meant to print only 1,000 the price for that quantity was $10,414 raising the unit price to $10, so it made sense to go with the higher quantity and increase our profit margin.

One print faux pas we unknowingly committed was that we had left no inside margin on the design to clear the perfect binding, usually a quarter-inch. This happened because the book was meant to be seen as a PDF, where the margins don’t really need those asymmetrical margins. Changing the inside margin would have meant adjusting all 136 pages, and that was simply not an option. So we decided to increase the width of the book by 0.25 inches, and simply move the layout to the outer edges. Not a big problem until we got to shipping supplies, where standard sizes are meant to accommodate 8.5-inch widths. Live and learn.

For the cover we wanted to do something “special” and we considered letterpress and laser-cutting, but either option involved transporting paper around from one printer to the other and that was too cost prohibitive. So we settled on metallic inks but rather than go with the usual silver, we went with some offbeat choices in deep purple and a grayish lavender. Go figure, it works. Inside, there is no real story, just straightforward CMYK, where we press-checked a couple of forms and Capital Printing took care of the rest.

So far we have sold more than 650 printed books, and we have recouped the printing investment. We were incredibly nervous when we took this gamble and even as we submitted the files we questioned if it was the right thing to do. Once again it’s been proven that print isn’t going anywhere, we all collectively enjoy the physical presence of a book and are willing to spend our hard-earned money on such items. (The PDF of Flaunt, by the way, is on par with the book, selling short of 650 copies).

More photos of some beautiful ink mixing here.

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Flaunt Book

Production Method

Design

UnderConsideration:
Bryony Gomez-Palacio
Armin Vit

Printing

Capital Printing